We’ve heard the media’s detoxification narrative over and over: a fringe group has cleaned up its act and joined the political mainstream, becoming a party like any other. The liberal press has been telling itself this story for years, uncritically relaying assertions that the FN has got rid of “the knee-jerk racists,” offering up fawning profiles of party figureheads, and imagining that Marine Le Pen took a principled stand against her father Jean-Marie’s antisemitism. A recent article described her niece, the profoundly homophobic and racist Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, as “a political star. Beautiful and fervently Catholic.” [...]
Le Pen’s recent claim that France bears no responsibility for the 1942 roundup of over thirteen thousand Jews at a Paris velodrome should remind everyone taking these detoxification claims at face value that when it comes to the FN, all is not as it seems. [...]
The controversy comes just as the mainstream right is trying to reframe the national narrative. Les Républicains candidate François Fillon famously claimed that France should not feel guilty about its former colonies: it did not invent slavery, and it was just trying to “share its culture” with the people of Africa, Asia, and North America. This is part of the Right’s broader strategy of ridding itself of its “complexes” and acting “without inhibition,” notably by rehabilitating France’s imperial past. [...]
Second, the mainstream right has radicalized. Unable to secure enthusiastic consent for neoliberal economic policies, the Sarkozy agenda focused on issues that boosted the FN: national identity, law and order, immigration, and Islamophobia. The development of a radical social authoritarianism among mainstream right voters was expressed most dramatically in mobilizations against gay marriage in 2013 but also in rising racist attitudes among right-wing voters and an increasing readiness to back the FN in second-round electoral contests against the Socialists.
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